Sanders Calls for Nationalized Health Care [semi-satire]

Semi-News/Semi-Satire ^ | 24 Jan 2016 | John Semmens

[John Semmens]

Riding on the crest of poll numbers showing a surge for his presidential bid, Sen. Bernie Sanders (S-Vt) upped the ante vs. rival former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by calling for a nationalization of health care.

"Obamacare is a confusing mess of broken promises," Sanders asserted. "We need to replace it with a fully socialized system where all medical payments and decisions are made by the federal government."

Under Sanders' proposal everyone would be covered with a zero deductible and zero co-pay plan. "No one should have to skimp on medical treatment merely because they'd have to pay out of pocket for visiting a doctor," Sanders said. "That decision should be based purely on health considerations."

The savings in avoiding health insurance premiums now hitting those under Obamacare would be offset by a 30% boost in federal tax rates—about $1.38 trillion per year. Whether that would be enough to cover the likely increase in demand for services with a zero out-of-pocket price to consumers seems doubtful.

To keep government costs from spiraling out of control, though, Sanders' plan calls for a government board to make determinations on which treatments are necessary and effective. "The notion that each individual doctor or patient can be permitted to decide how much treatment is needed has to be replaced by a more socially responsible metric, as it has under the United Kingdom's National Health Service," Sanders argued.

"Access to government-approved therapies will be free-of-charge to the patient," Sanders explained. "Wasteful, ineffective, and unapproved therapies will be outlawed. The current practice of letting those who can afford it the privilege of purchasing treatments outside of the nationalized system will be eliminated. No one has the right to waste society's collective resources on idiosyncratic medical theories. All will be allocated the modicum of health care that government experts determine is optimal for the whole."

Clinton labeled Sanders' plan "pie-in-the-sky socialism of the worst sort. While we agree that the anarchistic idea that individuals can be entrusted with decisions about how much to budget for their own health care, does anyone truly believe that a committee of government bureaucrats could efficiently and effectively determine a one-size-fits-all plan? Such authority should rest with medical community experts--the insurers and drug manufacturers--who have decades of experience in managing health care."

if you missed any of this week's other semi-news/semi-satire posts you can find them at...

http://azconservative.org/2016/01/23/sanders-calls-for-nationalized-health-care/

[pepsionice]

You could walk through some university and sell this to seventy-five percent of the students.

[MeganC]

This isn’t satire. Bernie really believes stuff like this.

[Idaho_Cowboy]

So where’s the satire?